9/11 memorial thread

I've been a poster at this bbs so damn long that I posted in the thread we had about the attack in 2001. I tried to search, but it looks like we only have data back to 2009. I wanted to see how my attitude about it has changed and what are arguments were back then. Oh well.

Still probably the most meaningful day for America in my lifetime, or at least since the fall of the Berlin Wall.

 

Ah yes, let’s commemorate the 9/11 victims by screaming “bulls***” about what happened to them.

 

Dude
Really?

 

I wasn't posting here yet (one year later), but I remember the day so clearly. I was in my west coast office listening to the radio, real-time, as the events unfolded. The first impact was treated as a freak accident, and when the second plane hit, everything changed. I had to walk into class and inform 30 students about what was happening. (This is before everyone would have known via their cell phones, if you can imagine a world like that.) I told them if they wanted to go watch updates on TV or call family on the east coast, they could leave class, but they all stayed. (Pre-meds gonna pre-med.)

EDIT: Looks like some of y'all need expanded ignore lists. I'm not seeing any nonsense so far.

 

Man, I tried to save this thread from being a Truther fight, but you took the bait!

 

The thread that was in the D&D had a rabid teenage moestavern demanding Arab blood.

 

I was at work that day. I had just came back into the office from checking on something in the field when a coworker told me we were under attack. We did not get much work done that day. We all spent the rest of the day watching the coverage in shock. Such a tragic event that changed our country forever. In the aftermath this country came together like never before in my lifetime. For a short while we were not Democrat/Republican, black/white, male/female, rich/poor, etc.... We were all together as Americans who took a huge black eye from a sucker punch.

 

I was working In College Park. MD 18 years ago. The woman in the cubicle next to me was talking to her daughter who worked in Manhattan when she heard the first plane hit. She thought it was some sort of explosion. As soon as I heard it was a plane, i knew it was deliberate. I'd read about the B-25 crashing into the Empire State Building in 1945 and the changes to flight paths around the city. Spent the next 20 minutes watching news coverage and saw the second pane hit the south tower. We also saw the collapse of the both towers and then we were released for the day as our facility was a federal building. I had just moved all the way out to Frederick, MD the week before and traffic on I-270 heading north was a nightmare. Spent the rest of the day watching the news. Had a brief moment of panic later that night when I heard a series of what sounded like a series of explosions and gunfire. It was just the fireworks from the nearby minor league baseball stadium. It was a long mentally exhausting day.

 

I was working at Offutt AFB in Nebraska that day I’m the vault in a messaging shop. We were in the middle of an exercise when all of a sudden my supervisor told me that a prop plane had just crashed into the Empire State Building. I asked him if it was part of the exercise, and he said no. I immediately ran to the computers as the radio broadcast we were listening switched over to the news. My main goal was to ensure messages got where they needed to go. As events unfolded, things on my end went crazy as messages were coming in quickly and we had to turn them around. Our lead NCO told folks that they had to move their cars, I stayed behind with my direct boss as everyone else ran outside.

Soon after they all left, the Pentagon was hit and I got a call from the Air Force rep there. We were their backup circuit and they needed to shut down their circuit and evacuate...luckily, they weren’t the side that was hit, but there were fires down the hall. I, in a fit of brilliance, asked the guy if it was due to the plane crash...luckily, he didn’t treat me as an idiot and he confirmed that it was. I said, we’re on it and got everything going.

When the others got back, it was our turn to move our cars away from the building. As I walked out, my boss told me he was going to Burger King because he had.a.feeling that this would take awhile. I went ahead and pulled my car around to a parking lot further away and then I saw him. There was a guard behind the barrier with a helmet, a flak vest and an M16. That’s when things started sinking in...here I was in Nebraska and people were gearing up for war.

As I made the walk back to the building, I began looking up to the sky wondering if a plane was coming to hit us. As I got back in, my lead NCO was yelling about DEFCON procedures; I yelled at him that we didn’t need to run throughout DEFCON procedures as that was another office’s responsibility. Luckily, the lines cleared up and message traffic died down to only essential traffic. We did have a couple of emergencies that we had to work through since this was the first real-world test for some aspects, but e got them cleared up. Before they locked the vault I was in, my boss came back from Burger King with a. While sack of burgers...apparently, he was the last guy through the drive thru before they evacuated so they just gave him whatever they had for free (bunch of whoppers with nothing but meat and cheese). Ended up being a clutch move considering.

It was interesting watching the message traffic compared to what was being reported, but eventually things died down once they grounded all flights around the US. At noon was the first time I was able to call my wife...she was hysterical, but I couldn’t talk long, just telling her I was OK.

We also had President Bush coming to us (Strategic Command) after he went through Louisiana. Let’s just say, we weren’t thrilled with that as the news stations had gotten wind of it and were reporting it repeatedly. Once we were allowed to leave the vault, my boss (same one that went to Burger King) and I went to one of our other shops to fix an issue. As we walked around a corner, a Major came sprinting around another corner with a bunch of folks with carry-on bags; it was some of Bush’s staff running into a strategy room. My boss, always the jokester, wanted to go in there...I asked him why...he said because there had to be free food in there. No one runs that fast unless there’s free food. I rolled my eyes and we went on.

After finishing at the other office, We walked up to the smoke pit as I was a smoker and needed a cigarette. When we got up there, there were a bunch of signs up saying “no smoking.” They didn’t want flames just in case of some kind of gas thing. At this point, I wasn’t happy and was having a bit of a mental breakdown. However, I pulled it together after my boss listened to me rant for a bit in that courtyard and we went back down to our office. At 5pm, after ensuring everything was good, I went next door and finally saw video footage of what happened. Watched it for about 5 minutes and felt sick; went back to the office instead.

At 6:30pm (we were on 12 hour shifts due to the exercise so we had gotten in at 5:45am), we finally were able to go home. As I drove home through all the barriers and checkpoints, I was just zoned out, smoking cigarette after cigarette. As I got in my driveway in base housing and walked to the front door, everything finally hit me. That’s where I started breaking down; it took me a moment before opening the door and then I went in where my wife rushed to me crying. I don’t really remember what happened after that.

The next day saw ID check at the gates...something that became permanent...along with barriers, helmets and flak vests. Everything for us in the military immediately changed. A month and a half later, I went to Korea for a year-Long assignment without my family. During that time, US approval in South Korea was at 33% due to a US contractor running over some kids, Ohno pushing the South Korean in the ice racing event at the Olympics, and Bush mentioning North Korea in the Axis of Evil. Exercises were increased over there so I got real good putting on chem gear and a gas mask. Deployments went way up afterwards, the Air Force’s mission became more ground based so we had to learn combat skills, and things got much harder on the family. Definitely an eventful day.

As far as it being bull&$@%; from what I saw that day, it wasn’t. What I do know is that we got lucky it wasn’t worse with more people dying in large amounts and more planes going down. We were lucky that president Bush didn’t give the order to shoot certain planes down as he had the option to do so multiple times. But, I’m just a dude on a forum...I don’t expect to change people’s minds if they want to believe something different, just giving my account of what happened that day.

Freedom isn’t free...

 

Thanks for signaling me. I won't respond in that thread, so I ported you over here.

It's actually pretty traumatic to read the thread unfold again all these years later, with the surprise and disbelief, anger, misinformation, calls for calm and calls for blood all in real time.

I'm disappointed to see, though, I'm not in this one. I'm sure we had a dozen related threads at the time and I must have been in some different one. I remember that day I was in high budget season so I had a lot of work to do. I saw it on the news while I was getting ready for work, but then I had to go. We watched a bit at work, but I needed to get budget submissions from 30 people that day, so I emailed a reminder. I got reproached for being insensitive. Which I suppose I was (though my bosses didn't move my deadline either) -- still in shock and not knowing how to digest this information. So I probably didn't post until the next day, and by then it was probably in a What to Do Next kinda thread.

 

What are some of the problems you have with the official report?

 

I hard cried while visiting the 9/11 memorial a few years ago. I will never forget that day.

 

Thanks for sharing that. Fascinating.

One comment: I recall clearly the first radio report said a prop plane! So odd, in retrospect. I think almost nobody witnessed the first impact (and survived), so people may have assumed anything that low and misguided had to be a private plane.

 

This is the only quality footage of the first plane strike.

 

I was doing advancing PHD candidate presentation that morning. When professors told me the news, I thought it was just a freak air plane accident and continued to talk physics.....I wondered why the professors were not interested in my talk at the time..

 

I've never been to NYC. I took a train to New England recently though, and stared like a slack-jawed yokel out the window as the New York skyline came into view. I saw the Freedom Tower with my own two eyes. It seems silly or overly dramatic, but it felt good to actually have that puzzle piece of reality solidify in my brain.

 

RIP to all of the victims. I do mean all. Lives lost are lives lost.

 

The young lives (>5000?) of US troops are missing here....They are the price too.

 

Volunteers. Civilians didn't ask to be in the line of fire or planes and bombs. I do hope their families have peace though along with the many with mental wounds but I still think of them as a different kind of casualty.